This is where Clair Ching will be posting her thoughts and whatever she learns at work if internet access is limited. (In short, where places blogging services and blogs are banned, my posts will be here.)

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Reading up on Story Points; Working in Pairs

Estimating how many hours of work could be a daunting task for a team. Currently we are estimating the level of difficulty in terms of story points. We currently don't really associate a point with a particular number of hours. We just basically assess how much effort is needed for each task. We do talk about the estimated time to complete the tasks but even tasks of the same complexity might have variations in terms of estimates in number of hours of work.

It has been interesting so far. There was a task given 20 story points because it was perceived to be quite difficult. The person assigned to do the single task with 20 story points was not really around when it was estimated. There were jokes about the task as something that requires god-like powers. Well... It was done in less than an hour. Hehe. That was really interesting.

Aside from applying story points, we are trying to work in pairs as much as we can. I technically don't work with just one person because there are three of us who function as business analysts at the moment. In any case, our goals include the following:

Make sure that everyone knows the processes, how the entire system works, the business rules.

Work in pairs -- to increase productivity as well as ensure that there would be someone working on the tasks though there might be team members who are not around (and they are assigned those tasks).

We also have Stand Up Meetings. As our CTO, Butch Landingin said, this would be meetings that would take only 10 minutes or so. Just so we all know the status of each person (estimates in finishing tasks, difficulties encountered, how much help is needed), etc.